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Veiled Threat: The guerrilla graffiti of Princess Hijab

About 5 or 6 years ago I stumbled on Princess Hijab’s myspace. With her[?] art posted without explanation–not that it needed much– I couldn’t help but feel great admiration for the traditional rebel. I couple of months later the myspace was down and I couldn’t find anything about her. Then during a blackout I picked up a BITCH magazine [a feminist magazine] and started to read it. There was a article on Princess Hijab!

In fact, Princess Hijab asserts, her dressing up of billboards is a symbolic act of resistance meanttoreassert a “physical and mental integrity” against what she calls the “visual terrorism” of advertising. Arguing that the human right of expression has been displaced by publicists, advertisers, and the machinery of capitalist, commodified culture, she offers that, “My work explores how something as intimate as the human body has become as distant as a message from your corporate sponsor.”

The message is so unique and powerful from the mere fact that Princess Hijab is actually not even Muslim. The article, which has more details is fantastic, you can read it here.

Princess Hijab’s offical website can be found here as well. The Japanese characters makes me wonder if Princess Hijab is actually Japanese…

To understand Princess Hijab’s art is to question the incongruities of our society. In this era of extreme visual marketing, Princess Hijab explores notions of space and representation, challenging people’s ideas on normative types of representations with the distinctive black veil. Her work is the living example of how symbolist imagery is woven in or out of the social landscape in order to question its motley texture through art.